Paper: astro-ph/0601414

Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 04:21:30 GMT (55kb)

Title: Exploring the surface properties of Transneptunian Objects and Centaurs
with polarimetric FORS1/VLT observations

Authors: S. Bagnulo, H. Boehnhardt, K. Muinonen, L. Kolokolova, I. Belskaya,
M.A. Barucci

Comments: 11 pages, 7 postscript figures, accepted by A&A
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Polarization is a powerful remote-sensing method to investigate solar system
bodies. It is an especially sensitive diagnostic tool to reveal physical
properties of the bodies whose observational characteristics are governed by
small scatterers (dust, regolith surfaces). For these objects, at small phase
angles, a negative polarization is observed, i.e., the electric vector E
oscillates predominantly in the scattering plane, contrary to what is typical
for rather smooth homogeneous surfaces. The behavior of negative polarization
with phase angle depends on the size, composition and packing of the
scatterers. These characteristics can be unveiled by modelling the light
scattering by the dust or regolith in terms of the coherent backscattering
mechanism.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601414 , 55kb)